Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Coupon Organization 101

I am, by no means, a coupon queen. I strive to be one, but alas, it does bore me. I cannot make myself go to three different markets to save $.35 on one item or buy the stuff at CVS or Walgreens only to have it sit in my bathroom for months on end. I don't like to have an unlimited amount of tooth paste on hand. It makes me nuts. I like to buy ahead a little bit, but not too much. I just don't like the clutter. Seriously, makes me kookoo. But .....

I do love saving at the market, you know maybe $20 to $30 in coupons [when they are doubled], I can do that. I have tried several coupon organization systems and I haven't been crazy about any of them. Then I stumbled upon a system that just might be crazy enough to work for me. I call it crazy, because when I explained it to my husband, he looked at me like I was crazy.

So I found a left over 3-ring notebook from my son's end of year junk last year. I think it is a 1/2" notebook. I got my other son's notebook full of Pokemon cards in baseball card sleeves and took all the cards out [much to his disappointment - side note: he hasn't looked at his cards for probably 6 months so the guilt didn't last very long]. Then, the fun part, organizing.

I sorted my coupons by how my market is laid out and what works for me. I got tabbed dividers [also happened to have on hand from my working days] and labeled each section. Then I started putting my coupons into the baseball card slots. There are 9 slots per page, you can even use the back side if you want, but I have a ton of baseball card sleeves so I'm just using the front. I did double up coupons, say for toilet paper, they all went into one slot, with the closest expiration date first.

Okay, ready for my first shopping trip. Pulled out coupons for items I wanted to purchase, I put them in the first sleeve. And off I went, shopping list in hand, coupon binder in cart. WOW, super duper easy. And best of all, if you see something on sale you just know you have a coupon for, you just flip through your pages and find your coupon. No more standing there in the aisle sorting through your stack of coupons hoping they don't all fall out of your hands. As I used my coupons, I pulled them out of the slot and put them in the clear pocket on the left so I had one pile to hand to the lady at check-out.

So if the old coupon organizer isn't working for you, think outside the box [or bag].

this is a great idea. I just bought a Dollar Store coupon holder, but they end up all jumbled in there together, half of them expired - this would make it much easier to find what I'm looking for. And I think I have some of those divided binder pages I can use (I bought a pack to use for recipes cut from magazines)